In comments to Bill's post on incarceration rates there is discussion of the issue of whether the higher (although shrinking) incarceration rate for African Americans is due to higher offending rates or discriminatory enforcement. I did a quick search for research on this subject.
I found Patrick A. Langan, Racism on Trial: New Evidence to Explain the Racial Composition of Prisons in the United States, 76 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 666 (1985). Langan summarizes his results on pages 682:
This Article presents the results of a study that tested two competing and controversial explanations of the relatively large numbers of blacks in state prisons. The one--the differential involvement hypothesis--attributes the high percentage of blacks in prison to their more frequent criminal involvement. The other explanation--the racial discrimination hypothesis--attributes it to pervasive racial discrimination against blacks in the administration of criminal justice.This article is over 30 years old now, so I would be interested in knowing if there is more recent, high-quality research. If not, it would be an interesting project to reproduce Langan's research with current data.
The findings much more strongly supported differential involvement than racial discrimination. At the rate that blacks committed crimes in 1973, blacks would have constituted at least 48.9% of prison admissions that year under a perfectly nondiscriminatory justice system. The fact that blacks did not constitute more than 48.9% suggests that discrimination was not the reason for their overrepresentation in prison admissions in 1973. In 1979, 43.8% of prison admissions would have been black under a nondiscriminatory justice system. Since blacks made up only 48.1% of admissions, discrimination, if it existed, accounted for very little of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison admissions in 1979. Similarly, in 1982, a nondiscriminatory system would have resulted in a black percentage of admissions of 44.9% while the actual percentage was 48.9%. These findings confirm those of Blumstein who, in a pioneering study using police arrest statistics to investigate one-day prison populations, also concluded that differential involvement, not racial discrimination, largely explained the racial composition of prisons in the United States.
1. The cry of "racism!" as the all-purpose excuse for criminality and the incarceration that is its proper consequence was tiresome 30 years ago and even more tiresome now.
2. It also has less of a basis in fact. It is true that racism has not entirely disappeared from the culture (police culture or any other). It is also true, and obvious to anyone who hasn't been living in a cave, that the degree of racism has diminished in the last three decades.
3. As the justification for race-based excuse-making fades, its deployment has become more menacing. It's not just that the cry of "racism!" is a belligerent chant; it's the New Censorship, in which opposition to the disastrous (especially for blacks) policies of scaled-back policing and incarceration is branded as forbidden speech.
4. The first thing I tell my students is that, while I much prefer respectful and considerate discussion, the class is not about "sensitivities." It's about reading and researching, and finding and telling the truth as best you can.
The most important difference I can see between (1) the speech and thought intimidation of BLM and its allies -- intimidation masked as the need for "inclusion" -- and (2) the McCarthyism of the 1950's, is that the press condemned the latter and facilitates the former.
Sincere thanks, Kent, for posting actual research from an actual source, rather than acting as though the mere request for sourcing is disingenuous. This is how fruitful and respectful discussions occur. Are you paying attention, Bill?
I second Kent's call for updated research on this subject. It would go a long way toward getting us closer to the consensus that Bill claims already exists, but which obviously does not.
One reason it does not exist is that other high-quality research HAS found troubling racial disparities. One example among many is this report from the US Sentencing Commission, which found that black males received substantially longer sentences than white males, after controlling for factors such as criminal history: http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2010/20100311_Multivariate_Regression_Analysis_Report.pdf
-Jim
Quick note: It's not too hard to replicate the 1982 Blumstein analysis of this subject (which is cited at the very beginning of the Langan article you shared) using much more current data from the FBI and BJS. I was curious, so I did it, using data from 2010 to 2014 (most recent available). In each of those years, black arrest and imprisonment rates did track one another pretty closely, at least for the Part I crimes, which are the likeliest to result in prison time (murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson).
According to the FBI, blacks accounted for 38-39% of all arrests for Part I violent crimes in each year between 2010 and 2014, while according to BJS, they accounted for 40-44% of all those imprisoned for Part I violent crimes in each of those years. The numbers on the property crime side were lower, but still reasonably close to one another: Blacks accounted for 28-30% of all those arrested for Part I property crimes each year, while they accounted for 31-34% of all those imprisoned for Part I property crimes each year.
All of this seems to confirm the initial Blumstein/Langan finding: that the disparity in imprisonment is generally the result of disparity in offending, at least as measured by arrests for serious crimes. (Many people, of course, think the arrest statistics themselves are the problem and that they’re an unfair representation of actual crime, but I think the Langan analysis offers a reasonable rebuttal to that point.) The only other thing I’d note is that all of the imprisonment percentages I listed above are slightly higher than the arrest percentages, which appears to leave some room for legitimate questions, like whether sentences are longer for black offenders vs. white offenders who committed the same crimes and have similar criminal histories. And of course drug offenders are not counted in this analysis at all.
-Jim